The Nonlinear Library LW - Kids or No kids by Kids or no kids
Nov 14, 2023
19:05
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Kids or No kids, published by Kids or no kids on November 14, 2023 on LessWrong.
This post summarizes how my partner and I decided whether to have children or not. We spent hundreds of hours on this decision and hope to save others part of that time. We found it very useful to read the thoughts of people who share significant parts of our values on the topic and thus want to "pay it forward" by writing this up.
In the end, we decided to have children; our son is four months old now and we're very happy with how we made the decision and with how our lives are now (through a combination of sheer luck and good planning). It was a very narrow and very tough decision though.
Both of us care a lot about having a positive impact on the world and our jobs are the main way we expect to have an impact (through direct work and/or earning to give). As a result, both of us are quite ambitious professionally; we moved multiple times for our jobs and work 50-60h weeks. I expect this write-up to be most useful for people for whom the same is true.
Bear in mind this is an incredibly loaded and very personal topic - some of our considerations may seem alienating or outrageous. Please note I am not at all trying to argue how anyone should make their life decisions! I just want to outline what worked well for us, so others may pick and choose to use part of that process and/or content for themselves.
Finally, please note that while many readers will know who I am and that is fine, I don't want this post to be findable when googling my name. Thus, I posted it under a new account and request that you don't use any personal references when commenting or mentioning it online.
Process - how we decided
We had many sessions together and separately, totaling hundreds of hours over the course of 2 years, on this decision and the research around it. My partner tracked 200 toggl hours, I estimate I spent a bit less time individually but our conversations come on top. In retrospect, it seems obvious, but it took me longer than I wish it would have to realize that this is important, very hard work, for which I needed high-quality, focused work time rather than the odd evening or lazy weekend.
We each made up our minds using roughly the considerations below - this took the bulk of the time. We then each framed our decision as "Yes/No if xyz", for instance, "Yes if I can work x hours in a typical week", and finally "negotiated" a plan under which we could agree on the conclusion "yes" or "no".
In this process, actually making a timetable of what a typical day would look like in 30-minute intervals was very useful. I'm rather agreeable, so I am likely to produce miscommunications of the sort "When you said "sometimes", I thought it meant more than one hour a day" - writing down what a typical day could look like helped us catch those. When hearing about this meticulous plan, many people told me that having kids would be a totally unpredictable adventure.
I found that not to be true - my predictions about what I would want, what would and wouldn't work, etc. largely held true so far. My suspicion is most people just don't try as hard as we did to make good predictions. A good amount of luck is of course also involved - we are blessed with a healthy, relatively calm, and content baby so far. Both of us feel happier than predicted if anything.
I came away from this process with a personal opinion: If it seems weird to spend hours deliberating and negotiating over an Excel sheet with your partner, consider how weird it is not to do that - you are making a decision that will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and is binding for years; if you made this type of decisions at work without running any numbers, you'd be out of a job and likely in court pretty quickly.
In our case, if you budget every hour ...
This post summarizes how my partner and I decided whether to have children or not. We spent hundreds of hours on this decision and hope to save others part of that time. We found it very useful to read the thoughts of people who share significant parts of our values on the topic and thus want to "pay it forward" by writing this up.
In the end, we decided to have children; our son is four months old now and we're very happy with how we made the decision and with how our lives are now (through a combination of sheer luck and good planning). It was a very narrow and very tough decision though.
Both of us care a lot about having a positive impact on the world and our jobs are the main way we expect to have an impact (through direct work and/or earning to give). As a result, both of us are quite ambitious professionally; we moved multiple times for our jobs and work 50-60h weeks. I expect this write-up to be most useful for people for whom the same is true.
Bear in mind this is an incredibly loaded and very personal topic - some of our considerations may seem alienating or outrageous. Please note I am not at all trying to argue how anyone should make their life decisions! I just want to outline what worked well for us, so others may pick and choose to use part of that process and/or content for themselves.
Finally, please note that while many readers will know who I am and that is fine, I don't want this post to be findable when googling my name. Thus, I posted it under a new account and request that you don't use any personal references when commenting or mentioning it online.
Process - how we decided
We had many sessions together and separately, totaling hundreds of hours over the course of 2 years, on this decision and the research around it. My partner tracked 200 toggl hours, I estimate I spent a bit less time individually but our conversations come on top. In retrospect, it seems obvious, but it took me longer than I wish it would have to realize that this is important, very hard work, for which I needed high-quality, focused work time rather than the odd evening or lazy weekend.
We each made up our minds using roughly the considerations below - this took the bulk of the time. We then each framed our decision as "Yes/No if xyz", for instance, "Yes if I can work x hours in a typical week", and finally "negotiated" a plan under which we could agree on the conclusion "yes" or "no".
In this process, actually making a timetable of what a typical day would look like in 30-minute intervals was very useful. I'm rather agreeable, so I am likely to produce miscommunications of the sort "When you said "sometimes", I thought it meant more than one hour a day" - writing down what a typical day could look like helped us catch those. When hearing about this meticulous plan, many people told me that having kids would be a totally unpredictable adventure.
I found that not to be true - my predictions about what I would want, what would and wouldn't work, etc. largely held true so far. My suspicion is most people just don't try as hard as we did to make good predictions. A good amount of luck is of course also involved - we are blessed with a healthy, relatively calm, and content baby so far. Both of us feel happier than predicted if anything.
I came away from this process with a personal opinion: If it seems weird to spend hours deliberating and negotiating over an Excel sheet with your partner, consider how weird it is not to do that - you are making a decision that will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and is binding for years; if you made this type of decisions at work without running any numbers, you'd be out of a job and likely in court pretty quickly.
In our case, if you budget every hour ...